Guest Posting from an experienced EM practitioner, and former co-director of the EM Forum, Ms Avagene Moore. [This is a follow on to the posting done last week with title noted above.]

Einstein also said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This can be applied to all aspects of the disaster business as well as all institutions of society.

There are many well-seasoned and experienced disaster professionals in the field world-wide. Unfortunately, we lack a way of channeling, compiling and making the most of that expertise and real-world knowledge. We continue to talk about the gap between research and practitioners but make little if any headway in bringing them together to benefit the disaster business. We nibble around the edges of situations, skirt the issues and rarely get to the core of the problems. Personally, I have to believe there is a way and I know there is a pressing need to change the perspective and culture of this multi-billion dollar disaster industry.

After 40 years in the emergency management field, my questions are: 1) Are we as the disaster community, at all levels, honest enough – dare I say thick-skinned enough – to examine ourselves and see the good, bad and the ugly? Having done that — 2) How do we courageously speak as one collective knowledgeable voice that is loud enough to be heard and make a difference?

From the Economist magazine, Sept. 2014, The Economics of Disasters.

The Diva is attending this conference: From Adversity to Opportunity: How the Aftermath of a Disaster Can Lead to a Safer Future. Note: Live video and Twitter feeds are available; see conference site for details.

This week, hundreds of experts, policymakers and practitioners will gather in Washington, D.C., for the second World Reconstruction Conference to explore how to use post-disaster recovery and reconstruction processes to create better lives and livelihoods around the world.

Launching at the conference will be the Recovery Framework Guide, which provides guidance for governments to better design and implement comprehensive disaster recovery programs.

Update: The newly issued documents are available for download:

• Post-Disaster Needs Assessment Guidelines; Vol. A and B (PDNA) and
• Guide to Developing Disaster Recovery Frameworks (DRF)

This past week the NY Times featured a lengthy, detailed article about the travails of New York residents struggling to recovery from Hurricane Sandy. See: Hurricane Sandy Recovery Program in New York City Was Mired by Its Design; Broken Pledges and Bottlenecks Hurt Mayor Bloomberg’s Build It Back Effort.

Shortly after it appeared I got a note from James Fossett making the following points:  “Your readers may be interested in this account of the difficulties New York City’s been having getting its home repair program moving after Hurricane Sandy. All the execution problems that have been noted before in trying to stand up an improvised program from scratch—bad design by expensive consultants, large numbers of untrained temporary hires who don’t quite get how programs are supposed to work, software that doesn’t work, plus too much focus on avoiding fraud. We still don’t know how to do large scale recovery effectively.”  [He is the author of an important piece titled Let’s Stop Improvising Recovery, which I posted here some months ago.]

I urge you to read the whole NYTimes article, but here are a couple of key points:

While hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money sat waiting to be used, devastated homeowners were stuck in a n application process that was overdesigned and undermanaged……”

Nearly every federally financed disaster recovery problem has stumbled because of complicated rules and the difficulty of creating a large-scale operation in the aftermath of a crisis. But there is a widespread perception … that …  the city’s program miscalculations worsened matters.

Granted that recovery may be perceived as a “wicked” problem, a term the public  public administration community uses for  complex and/or intractable problems. But there is some serious literature on such problems — just plug the term into Google Scholar and look.

More than once I have also lamented the fact that federal officials have never made the effort to engage the public administration and related research communities — via either the National Academy of Sciences of the National Academy of Public Administration — to help them think through the process of long term recovery from disasters. We have wasted time and billions of dollars over the past several decades. Not to mention the human anguish from inept recovery efforts.

All levels of government and all sectors of society have work to do to improve recovery.  It’s time to admit the inadequacies and get help dealing with them.

The Diva attended this event. While there she meet a couple of blog followers.

UPDATE: As of Sept. 30th a video of the sessions has been posted to the NAS website: http://resilientamerica.nas.edu

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Workshop: Measures of Community Resilience: From Lessons Learned to Lessons Applied

Friday, September 5, 2014
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
National Academy of Sciences Building – Auditorium
2101 Constitution Ave., N.W. – Washington, DC 20418

• View the Agenda
• Access online The Resilient America Roundtable will host a workshop that focuses on the kinds of indicators that exist for measuring resilience, and which indicators communities might use and why.

The workshop will use as a foundation for discussion the four broad types of resilience indicators identified in the NRC (2012) report Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative:

From the American Library Association, a new book titled “Library as Safe Haven: Disaster Planning, Response, and Recovery; A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. It is not inexpensive, but it might be a worthwhile investment for some.

The authors have been very involved in encouraging libraries to be prepared for disasters, and have much to share from both their personal experiences and professional advocacy.